There are 3 kinds of people that annoy me the most:
- Un-self-aware hypocrites,
- Mindless bandwagoners,
- and people with authority but not enough accountability
And nowhere do I see this more personified than in online debate.
I like to think of myself as more self-aware than most when it comes to online discourse. That is, I try to catch myself before falling into cognitive traps when I analyze a subject.
Unfortunately, most others online don’t, and I feel the need to call it out. Whether you happen to be right or wrong now, you’re fickle and gullible until you recognize when you’re being played, and when you’re doing the playing.
So let me teach you how to debate something online without making a fool of yourself.
Notice Fallacies
Our brains like to take shortcuts because they save time and are right most of the time. But when it comes to logical argumentation, shortcuts are where the pleasant deceptions lie.
Most of our beliefs are emotionally motivated, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise. So chances are, some of your beliefs are a result of your mind subconsciously falling back on a fallacy to give you that edge of confidence you need to not question yourself.
I’ll go over a few fallacies that I see very often in discourse, and I hope you’ll start to see them too after this. There are many others, but I want to go over some that aren’t talked about much. Note that some of these don’t have an official name because they’re too specific to be formalized. Also, I’ll be using spicy, political examples.
The Wordplay Fallacy. I made up this name for what is a variant of The Fallacy of Equivocation I often notice. It’s when someone makes an argument where they use a different meaning of a specific word than is common or correct to describe or group things in an incorrect way.
“Gender inequality is a result of systemic sexism. Therefore, if your team isn’t gender-equal, there are sexists among the people who formed your team.” This person is conflating individual sexism with systemic sexism. The former is an individual’s conscious or subconscious bias, whereas the latter is generalized to the wider society and isn’t always due to intentional discrimination, but unfortunate consequences of a common procedure. It’s important to understand the definitions of words that sound similar but mean very different things.
Another one is, “If you have faith in people and things in your life, then you’re no different from someone who has faith in a higher purpose. Therefore, everyone is religious.” I’ve actually heard arguments like this before.
Or, “Bigoted speech is an attack on minority rights. Attacks are a form of violence, so bigots should be punished by law because they’re violent.” Even if you agree with the conclusion, bigots aren’t always physically violent. There’s a lot of grey area when it comes to verbal violence.
“Stated Purpose” Deniability. This is when a community that is obviously biased, exclusionary, or even hateful by their actions, denies that under their stated purpose.
“We are a movement that advocates equality for all,” but the discourse and members are predominantly of a certain demographic.
“We just want to provide a safe space for certain people,” but the discourse is extremely hateful, toxic, and not conducive to healing.
False Analogy. Analogies are the most misused form of arguments in my opinion. The idea is to get your opponent to reconcile inconsistent positions by drawing on similarities. But this only works when the context and facts of the matters are also very similar. Even then, an analogy can be “cogent” or convincing, but still conclude incorrectly because it’s an inductive argument. Deductive arguments are absolute, whereas inductive arguments are probabilistic.
Here’s a strong analogy. “If you believe the scientific consensus on the validity of evolution, you should also believe the consensus on climate change.” The point here isn’t whether this is decidedly right or wrong. The point is that the standard of evidence and credibility of consensus is so high that it’s a good point to be brought up for further discussion.
Here’s a weak analogy. “If gun access should be heavily controlled, so should any other potential murder weapons like knives, vehicles, bats, etc.” While this does deserve a little discussion, it’s pretty weak when you realize just how much easier it is to kill with a firearm than a blunt object or a short-range weapon. Or how many positive uses these other instruments have, whereas a gun is just meant for shooting.
The important thing is to use your analogies in good faith, and not be obtuse about it.
Keep in mind, you’re likely ignoring fallacies when they’re used by someone who agrees with you because you’re afraid of being shunned for “infighting” (or you just don’t care, which is also wrong). Challenging your allies only makes them stronger later on, which will make your opponents look dumber.
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